68 MEDIAEVAL CIVILIZATION to enter the army had, little by little, become knights. The land then belonged to the churches, the lords, and the knights, all great proprietors, who did not cultivate it themselves; it was divided into great domains called villes (Latin villa, domain). In general a ville1 was what we would call a village, and the domain had the extent of a commune. Almost all the French villages trace their origin to one of these domains of the Middle Ages. The peasants who lived in these towns or villes had taken their name from the word "ville/1 and were called villeins. They were not proprietors of the soil, they only cultivated it. Some of them were formerly poor freemen., who had gone into the service of the proprietors as coloni, that is to say, as farmers; they were called francs (freemen). Others were descend- ants of former slaves of the proprietors and still bore the Roman name of slave; they were the serfs (servi). However, the serf was no longer the same as the Roman slave; he belonged to the estate, he had a family, a house, and a field. His master could neither take him from his village in order to sell him away from the domain, nor take from him his wife or his children, nor take away his house and his field which had been granted to his ancestors. The serf villein was not much inferior in rank to the franc or free villein. Condition of the Villeins.—In the great domains of the Middle Ages there were two kinds of lands. One kind, the larger portion, had been ceded to the peasants *A seignior usually was possessed of several villes, some- times isolated, sometimes contiguous,